Tuesday, September 13, 2011

My latest favorite...Symbaloo

I now have six days under my belt as a "Technology Teacher." While there have been a few challenges, I really do love my job. One tool that has helped my students and me is Symbaloo.

Symbaloo EDU is a free Web 2.0 tool that allows users to create their own collection of websites.

I can search for tiles that have already been created. This is a great resource for educational websites. I can also create my own, which I have been doing almost daily! Two classes of Kindergarten students come into our lab each day. When I find an activity I want these young non-readers to access, I create a link they can recognize and click on.

Another feature that makes Symbaloo fantastic is the ease of making a webmix (a collection of tiles) the homepage of a browser. My first graders can already log on, launch Firefox, and navigate to a website. They can also close a tab with a single click to get back to our webmix. Symbaloo gives my non-readers the ability to easily get to the sites I have selected.